Malaysian telco TIME dotCom (TdC) has announced that it has signed a construction and maintenance agreement for the Asia Pacific Gateway (APG) submarine cable system connecting Malaysia to Korea and Japan. The operator noted that, as part of its global bandwidth business strategy, its wholly owned subsidiaries and global bandwidth business arms, Global Transit Communication and Global Transit Limited, collectively known as Global Transit, will administer the APG. Saiful Husni, CEO of Global Transit, said that TdC’s investment in the APG cable system completes its ASEAN to USA connectivity route and solidifies the group as a serious global telecommunication bandwidth provider, noting: ‘Combining TIME’s Malaysia-wide fibre network, Global Transit’s regional network nodes, ownership in the trans-pacific Unity cable, and now the APG system, the TIME Group has a complete land and sea fibre network footprint to capture the high-growth bandwidth demand in Asia … An advantage is that we have a global network system landing directly into Malaysia. This lowers our dependencies on Singapore as the main gateway for internet traffic. We can now channel high volumes of this traffic on our network with the lowest latency, directly to the US.’

The APG is a 10,000km international fibre optic cable system that will link Malaysia to Korea and Japan with seven branches to other Asian countries. Construction work is expected to start in the second half of 2012, with the cable system scheduled to be ready for service in the third quarter of 2014.